All-told, Kingmaker isn't a stellar outing, hampered by a litany of small issues, balancing, and the gargantuan knowledge base you'll need to play most effectively. But, for those with the patience, the rewards are well worth the investment.

Unfortunately, you have to put up with a fair amount of frustration and filler before you get to enjoy the best of what World of Final Fantasy has to offer, namely charming writing and Final Fantasy fan service. If you’re willing to put up with some of the game’s mundane sequences, you’ll get some enjoyment out of it, but if you’re not a Final Fantasy fanatic, the magic in these moments may be lost altogether.

As far as adaptations go, OK K.O.! Let's Play Heroes looks and sounds fantastic in a way that is distinct yet faithful to the source material. But the shallow mechanics, the repetitiveness of the gameplay loop, and narrative pacing issues prevent the game from being a rousing knockout.

Minor frustrations and inconsistency compound a game that's not very good in the first place, making it one of the least appealing platformer choices currently on the market.

May be an improvement on "Legion," and it may focus on an often-neglected part of history in the early Near East civilizations, but there are better options out there if you enjoy historical strategy games like these.

Worms: Ultimate Mayhem delivers a high quantity of underwhelming content that does nothing to improve the 3D Worms experience.

Unfortunately, the excitement of that original Mortal Kombat 1 ending is gone, and in its place rests a trepidation and unease over where the story might go next. Fittingly, it seems this once-promising story has been thrown into, well, chaos.

Kill Team's dual-stick shooting action has an old-fashioned arcade appeal, but it's too simple to stand out from the crowd.

Once again, the strategy elements of the empires mode do a lot to make up for the mundanity of the aging Warriors combat system, but it's not quite enough.

It's a second-verse-same-as-the-first stand-alone expansion that adds seafaring jobs but fails to correct any of the issues of the original game.

Being a gladiator in ancient Rome probably wasn't much fun, and it's not much fun in this repetitive fighting game, either.

ModNation Racers: Road Trip gets off to an exciting start but sputters and lurches across the finish line.

It's unfortunate that "letdown" and "underwhelmed" are words I've used multiple times when talking about Open Roads because there's still so much about the game that works. The overall narrative touches on some meaningful topics, there's a fair amount of intrigue, plenty of well-crafted dialogue, some interesting characters, and a lot of heart. Yet most things fall frustratingly short or are cut off far too early, making the whole experience slightly lackluster. Despite being a game about a mother-daughter road trip, the game doesn't go too far and that relationship is left only slightly altered rather than meaningfully examined and changed.

This blend of vehicular combat and soccer is fun in short sessions, but it's too frustrating to offer much long-term appeal.

Tedium and monotony overwhelm Mickey's new adventure, smothering its clever use of the Disney license.

Aside from the name, this street racer has little to distinguish itself from an already crowded field.

If you stripped away the sluggish combat and hollow questing, you’d be left with the most gorgeous fantasy hiking simulator this side of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt.

The developers at Untame should be proud and confident that they can build thorough and robust gameplay structures around their ideas. But the concept at the centre of Mushroom 11, I would implore, is not something they should return to.

A game that woefully undercooks its concept, a partial success in that nothing that the game does is particularly bad, but for a concept that has always felt like a no-brainer, “why didn't somebody think of that before” situation, the fact that it doesn't do some fairly obviously things to make the game earn its price tag is disheartening.

The moments when a solution just makes you say "Really?" in a frustrated tone and when you wander seemingly without direction occur often enough to rob Broken Age of a sad amount of its magic.

It's rich in content, but the shallow battle system and unnecessarily bloated health bars of some foes make this feel more like a hesitant step in the right direction than a true home run for the franchise.

AI issues and the lack of any significant new features have NHL 2K9 skating backward this year.

It's still somewhat thrilling to inhabit the captain's chair on the bridge of a starship--at the bare minimum, Star Trek: Bridge Crew accomplishes that mission. When the game is at its best, the spirit of cooperation between various asymmetrical elements is encouraging--even special. In every other regard, however, Bridge Crew is forgettable the second you pull out of VR.

There are problems with just about every aspect of Victor Vran. The issues range from small to large, from the glitches to frequent crashes and audio cutouts. Still, there’s a lot to enjoy about it.

With its focus on weapon grabbing over weapon firing, Small Arms' shallow gameplay falls flat.

Gory combat comes at a high cost in the uneven Shank 2.

Sadly, the good game you can imagine is stuck lurking in the shadows of the game it became.

There isn't much to do in Ninjala, and what content is present almost requires a battle pass to be fully enjoyed. But what we have so far is a solid foundation. The battle fundamentals are well-designed and unique, and the visual flair is absolutely bursting with personality.